


but be prepared to bleed

by napoleonscomet



Category: Voyná i mir | War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Genre: Literary References & Allusions, M/M, today on: the borodino truth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-02
Updated: 2019-07-02
Packaged: 2020-06-03 01:48:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19453849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/napoleonscomet/pseuds/napoleonscomet
Summary: “I,” protests Andrei, but there’s not a trace of imperator in his voice, “am as constant as the northern star.” He reaches out an unsteady hand and clasps Pierre’s arm, fingers tangling in the fabric of his shirt.





	but be prepared to bleed

**Author's Note:**

> yet another retelling of the eve of borodino, although the setting is almost entirely ambiguous. inspired by that scene in war and peace (2007) where pierre literally all but asks andrei to run away with him. title from "a case of you" by joni mitchell. i'm not really sure what this is besides an experiment in minimalistic prose. enjoy.

“Run away with me.”

“What?” Pierre’s voice and Andrei’s reply resound in the heavy twilight and the still air between them. Andrei moves to repeat the question but no sound comes out. Pierre flushes, his face a mottled blush that makes Andrei’s heart constrict painfully.

“You heard what I said,” he whispers, eyes cast down.

“Pierre, you’re the one that runs,” says Andrei. “Not I. We’re not the same person.”

“When I came to you in Bogucharovo: Why were you there if you weren’t running? Why did you go to the war in 1805? Why are you here now? Andrei, you run as much as I do. Maybe more.”

“I,” protests Andrei, but there’s not a trace of _imperator_ in his voice, “am as constant as the northern star.” He reaches out an unsteady hand and clasps Pierre’s arm, fingers tangling in the fabric of his shirt.

“A constant slipping away, then,” Pierre replies. “The northern star _changes—_ it takes millenia, but it does. Thousands of years ago there was a different star overhead.”

“Damn your philosophy.” Andrei grimaces, his mouth a gash thin and bloody slashed across his marble face. “I’ve never seen it change—time goes on and on.” Pierre tries to take his hand, but he twitches away. Pierre’s face blurs, ever just. “It’s not 1804.”

“It’s been eight years already?” Pierre asks, blinking. “We’ve been friends in the meanwhile.”

“The best of friends,” Andrei replies. “That’s not enough.” The stars are slipping out of the sky, bending earthward from the firmament, scattering the heavens with their streaked trails, and it has been eight years. “I know that you love her too.”

“I thought we weren’t to speak of that?”

Andrei waves him off, his movement frenetic. “There’s no time.” Pierre sighs.

“She’s the horizon,” he admits after a breath held and released. “Everything leads to her—I walk forward and I never get close enough to touch her. You’re still fixed in the sky.”

“Cold and distant,” Andrei replies, and every time he’s said the same thing drifts through his head—every time he’s known the worst of himself and been unable to change. _I can’t be_ _him (I can’t be_ you _)_ _._

“Always _there_ ,” Pierre implores him. “All these years and we’ve changed the same. Look at me, I’m before you again; the same.”

“Nothing is the same.” Andrei bites off a reply and gestures at himself, the sick hollows of his body, the knife that cuts at his heart, the lines on his face carved by an inexpert Pygmalion. But Pierre moves closer.

“We’ve lived our lives in parallel, the whole time,” he replies. “Unerringly close—never further.”

“We faltered.” Pierre flinches.

“But it’s always balanced out over time—I’ve always held my orbit.”

“Parallel...” acquiesces Andrei.

“To know you is to know myself.”

“Does that make me Narcissus?”

Pierre’s flush deepens until his entire face is red, but he says it anyway. “Is that why you’re untouchable?”

“To know you is to know myself,” Andrei repeats. “What if I never wanted to come so close to myself?”

“But it’s not you,” says Pierre. “It’s me.”

“It’s not 1804. I said it wouldn’t happen again.”

“You said you would never love again. You said you would never go to war again.” Pierre is headstrong.

“I’m going to die,” says Andrei. It’s true—he’s long come to terms with his impending mortality.

“You sound like Hamlet.”

“Would that make you Horatio?” asks Andrei, and his tone is just on the softer edge of mocking.

“‘Here, sweet lord’,” quotes Pierre, and in his voice it’s almost enough to make Andrei close the gap between the two of them, to press his face to Pierre’s shoulder, not to cry but to feel drily the same emptiness and depletion.

Instead, he changes the subject. “Where would I be if you had never happened to me?”

Pierre shudders. “I can’t imagine it.”

“Is that what all this comes down to?” Andrei asks. “Is that what this means?” This— _this_ is the question that he’s spent the eight intervening years in a vain attempt to answer: what _this_ is, this friendship stable and unsteady, blossomed into its complications from a night that won’t be unwritten, however hard Andrei wills it into oblivion. He turns away by half.

Pierre’s voice is steady; insistant. “My life would be nothing without you. Nothing.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s _true_.”

“I can’t not listen to you—not when it’s _you_. Don’t say it.”

“Andrei.” Pierre’s eyes, behind his glasses, are bright. “Who’s running away now?”

He hesitates, and turns back. His face is hot. His hands are steady at last; the lapels of Pierre’s waistcoat crumple in their grasp. Their faces are very close.

Andrei says: “I am not running.”

…

Pierre comes to him in the field hospital, his body broken as his heart. He tries to prop himself up, but he can’t, and his friend rushes to him, rests his palm on his feverish cheek.

“I’m going to take you away from here,” says Pierre.


End file.
